In addition to the panel’s recommendations, regulations were passed in 1974 that required researchers to get voluntary informed consent from all persons taking part in studies done or funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW). They also required that all DHEW-supported studies using human subjects be reviewed by Institutional Review Boards, which read study protocols and decide whether they meet ethical standards.

The rules and policies for human subjects research have been reviewed and revised many times since they were first approved. From 1980-1983, the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral ResearchExternal looked at federal rules for doing research on human subjects to see how well those rules were being followed. An Ethics Advisory Board was formed in the late 1970s to review ethical issues of biomedical research. In 1991, federal departments and agencies (16 total) adopted the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects.